Fake "Before and After" Images and Color Timing

Criticize a finished movie all you want but please don’t make pretend “before and after” split screen images to stoke anger about color timing. The discourse is bad enough as it is.

The top image is a production still taken with a still camera and processed and color corrected for the express purpose of looking good as a production still (to be used online, magazines and newspapers). The bottom image is an altered frame from the trailer(?), which typically has different color timing choices than the final film. Of course, the original poster doesn't care about any of this.

It's very easy to make fake before/after images. See?

Also, please define "before" to me, either with film acquisition or digital acquisition. (There is no "before". There's only "the image as it has been handed to me by the previous step in the image pipeline".)

A while back someone tried to do a "gotcha!" tweet comparing the original "Halloween" (1978) and a grab from the trailer of "Halloween Ends" (2022). The original tweet is no longer online because the author has protected their tweets. This was their "comparison image", complaining how ugly the new movie looks:

I wrote:

[screenshot from 30-year old masterpiece, one of the most beautiful movies ever filmed]

[screenshot from random modern shitty movie gamma’d up]

look how fuckin ugly movies are today

But it wasn't even a fair comparison, since their "Halloween" screengrab was artificially brightened, and the screengrab from the "Ends" trailer" was decontrasted and brightened falsely.

Below is a good faith comparison of a production still (made by a still photographer corrected for use on the web/newspaper/magazine) and the finished MOVIE frame. Very different images made for very different uses.

original "Ant-Man 3" tweet: https://twitter.com/tvaziri/status/1627164184583766018

original "Halloween Ends" tweet: https://twitter.com/tvaziri/status/1579566528751886336

Converging Lines: "The Shining," Part 2

This is Part 2 of our continuing series, "Converging Lines." Read Part 1.

As we discussed in Part 1, "The Dark Knight" combined careful choices of camera placement and lenses with production design and location work to create distinctive converging lines of perspective. Its ultimate aesthetic impact was to impart a sense of looming doom, about a city collapsing upon itself with individual morality and societal cooperation hanging precariously in the balance.

While the use of this visual tool was somewhat subtle in Christopher Nolan's film, Stanley Kubrick pulled out all the stops in "The Shining;" he and cinematographer John Alcott boldly made this stylistic technique a major, driving force in the aesthetic of their film.

For one, Kubrick and Alcott made the unusual choice of framing their film to the full expanse of the film negative, shooting with spherical lenses and ultimately projecting a 1.37 to 1 aspect ratio (As opposed to the standard 1.85 to 1 aspect ratio of standard Academy projection, or the 2.35 to 1 aspect ratio of widescreen films). In fact, Kubrick shot his final four films in this same way-- "Barry Lyndon" (also with Alcott), "Full Metal Jacket" (with Douglas Wilsome), "Eyes Wide Shut" (with Larry Smith). Shooting in this nearly square aspect ratio compresses the horizontal visual range. Vistas and wide, epic films are traditionally shot in widescreen, while more intimate, character-oriented films are traditionally shot in narrower ratios, like 1.85. Using 1.37 as an aspect ratio immediately gives "The Shining" a distinctive look.

Secondly, their use of this nearly square aspect ratio enhances the emotional and psychological effects of the use of wide angle lenses and long, parallel stretches in production design and location work. Kubrick rarely used a long lens, favoring superwide fields of view to exaggerate the feeling of claustrophobia and accentuate the converging lines of perspective.
The same visual technique, photographed with different aspect ratios, gives the audience different psychological impacts. In "Batman's" horizontally wide field of view, the converging lines give the audience the impression that this large, expansive world is looking at its characters and challenging their moral fiber. In "The Shining's" boxy aspect ratio, the converging lines give the audience a creepy, uneasy feeling, as if the world is boxing us in, forcing claustrophobia upon the audience and the characters-- all of which are strong themes in the film.

If you're truly interested in this type of discussion, I highly recommend picking up the amazing book, "The Visual Story" written by Bruce Block, which contains volumes about screen space, vectors, color, perspective, lenses and even the rhythms of a traditional Hollywood narrative screenplay. In one of the most interesting sections, "Story and Visual Structure," Block illustrates his ideas about story beats by analyzing and breaking apart the story beats of films like Hitchcock's "North By Northwest" and Spielberg's "Raiders of the Lost Ark." It's a must read for film fanatics who care about this kind of stuff.

Notice how Kubrick uses this technique in these frames from "The Shining," from the most apparent examples (any shot from the Overlook hotel hallways) to the less obvious (the police radio room and the near-point-of-view shot of Halloran).

"Raiders of the Lost Ark:" Simply Cool Shots

Wrapping up our series, paying tribute to the photography of Douglas Slocombe for "Raiders of the Lost Ark." (Be sure to see Part 1, "Raiders:" Shadows and Silhouettes, Part 2, "Raiders:" Eyes, and Part 3, "Raiders:" Foregrounds and Backgrounds.)

Here is a sampling of just plain cool in-camera shots (no visual effects) from "Raiders."